If you ask most experts why we should worry about all those honeybees and wild bees that are famously dying off, they’ll often give a simple answer: because bees pollinate so many of our crops… What’s more, even those wild bees that aren’t pollinating crops at all may still be providing valuable services in the wild- we just haven’t studied those services yet, or slapped a dollar value on it… “If you lost all those pollinators that aren’t pollinating crops, we’d start losing a lot of native plants across Europe and North America,” says Rachel Winfree, an ecologist at Rutgers University and a co-author of the Nature Communications study. “If you start losing a lot of plant species, ecosystems can start collapsing. That can have all sorts of very negative effects, even if we can’t estimate it exactly. We’re only at the beginning of this quantification process.”